I am going to tell you something about the plan I have for the book I have coming out in September. But first... some background info. I've been working on a book for a few years, on and off. With work and kids and everything else it was a bit of a slog to complete. …
There are a few steps to getting a book out into the world. There's the actual writing, which is slow and uninteresting, but then there are fun parts. Bright shiny parts. Like thinking about possible covers. I remember making a cover myself, long ago, in an effort to help myself visualize the fact that one …
Continue reading 10 Book Covers That I Really Like (also, homework)
The Girl in the Video is a cyber-stalky horror thriller from This is Horror podcast host Michael David Wilson. I've listened to the This is Horror Podcast for a while and so I knew that the author and podcast host had good taste in horror. The book is about a teacher living in Japan who …
Continue reading The Girl in the Video – Michael David Wilson
This is the story of how I turned a flash fiction story written in an hour for a Flash Fiction thing on Chuck Wendig's blog into a week-long writing residency in Exeter in the U.K. Chuck Wendig is the author of numerous books (buy Wonderers and thank me later) but I first encountered him as …
I'm a massive Raymond Chandler fanboy, though I only started reading him recently. And here's an example that shows exactly why I'm a massive Chandler fanboy. Half an hour and three or four cigarettes later a door opened behind Miss Fromsett's desk and two men came out backwards laughing. A third man held the door …
I asked you about your favorite books on Twitter recently, and got more responses than I anticipated. About 955, as it turns out. https://twitter.com/johannthors/status/1161231619568676865?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Here are the books that were mentioned most often (including quite a few that surprised me.) The Phantom TollboothEast of Eden & Grapes of WrathTo Kill a MockingbirdHouse of LeavesA Tree …
I got to spend a week in Exeter this summer, as the International Writer-in-Residence at the Quay Words literary festival. Part of the deal was to give a talk on Icelandic crime writing and at the end of that talk (which I may post here later) I told the audience about the books that most …
It's Pirates of the Caribbean in Hell. It's the best horror story of the year for me so far, possibly one of my favorite horror stories ever. It has Hell-monks with iron boxes locked over their heads forever, pirate ships, cannibal cults and last and definitely not least, flying, ship-destroying angel-possessed giant squid. I am, …
Continue reading This is the Best Pirate-themed Horror Story You’ll Read All Year
Nisar Masoon interviewed me for Literary Retreat a while back. They had some issues with their SSL certification but that's all fixed now and the interview is up. Some time passed between the interview and the publication so I was surprised to find the following (which, yes, are my words but I had forgotten them …
FINCH is one of my favorite books. I can't understand why it hasn't been made into a series, or why there aren't more people running through the streets, thrusting a copy of FINCH upon random strangers exclaiming "You need to read this!" Ok. That last one was maybe a bit much. It's about a detective, …
Continue reading The Sublime Weirdness of Jeff Vandermeer’s FINCH
